


Just another way to survive

by Nary



Category: Dani California - Red Hot Chili Peppers (Song)
Genre: Bartenders, Con Artists, Drinking, F/M, Robbery, Strippers & Strip Clubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 17:38:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1787464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nary/pseuds/Nary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quiet night in a dusty North Dakota oil town, and a stranger walks into a club...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just another way to survive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Malkontent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malkontent/gifts).



The town is always dusty, the air thick with a haze of grit that will take days to wash off after you leave. It's what they call a boom town - in this case the boom is oil, but it could have been gold or nickel or natural gas. It's something men can pull out of the earth with machines and sell for a shit-ton of money, and that's all that matters. Maybe once it was a nice, quiet little place where farmers or ranchers lived with their families. Now the roads are lined with makeshift trailers and dorms to house all the workers, and there are four bars and two strip clubs but not a lot of other businesses. It was a big deal when a Subway opened back in March. That's the kind of town this is. A place to stop for a few weeks or a few years, make some money, and leave.

Evie's been there six months, bartending at the better of the two strip joints. She came there planning on stripping, but the manager needed someone to fill in behind the bar the day she got there - the last girl just up and left without warning, like everyone here does sooner or later. The work was easier, and the tips were still pretty decent since all the dancers were expected to give her a cut from their earnings each night. What was originally going to be a two-week stint turned into a month, and then two, and now she doesn't know when she'll leave, only that someday she will wake up and realize it's time to go.

It's a slow night, a Wednesday. The new dancers come in on Mondays, so that's always busy, and payday is Friday, but in the middle of the week there are sometimes moments of quiet, especially if the weather's shitty like tonight. It's not raining, because it hardly ever does that out here, but it's windy and cold, and Evie doesn't blame the guys for staying in and watching TV instead. The girl on the stage, who goes by Holliday but whose real name is Kate, is halfway through a twenty-minute set for the handful of folks who've turned up, but her heart isn't really in it, and neither is theirs.

The door swings open and a new guy walks in, trailing another cloud of dust behind him. Evie hasn't seen him before, but that doesn't mean anything here. She doesn't usually tend to check out the customers, but she can't help noticing he's handsome in a rough, hangdog kind of way. He looks like he was already down when somebody kicked him. He gives a quick, furtive look at the dancer on stage and then comes to sit at the bar instead. Evie puts down the glass she was cleaning and gives him a nod. "What can I get you?"

"Jack Daniels," he says without hesitation. "A double. And start a tab." It makes a difference from the endless Coors and Bud Light orders, so Evie already likes the guy for that reason alone. His voice is low, with a Southern twang to it, but most folks here are from somewhere else. Still, he's got a look in his eyes like he's seen some bad shit, and the double disappears just as soon as she sets it in front of him. She pours him another before he asks, and that one he takes a little slower.

In the movies, bartenders are the ones people who are hurting pour out their hearts to, but in real life Evie's mostly found that they want to ask her if her tits are real (yes, not that it's any of their business) or whether she has a boyfriend (no, ditto.) Deep conversations might happen in other bars, but not here. So when the guy at the bar starts to talk, it takes her a minute before she realizes it's to her.

"... shoulda seen it coming," he mutters, but she has no idea what he thinks he should have seen coming. As shaken as he looks, she wonders if maybe he hit a coyote or a deer on his way into town. Or something bigger, maybe. 

Against her better judgment, she leans on the bar across from him. "Something wrong?"

To her surprise he starts to laugh, a slow chortle that ends in a wince and a hand pressed to his ribs. "It only hurts when I laugh, that's all," he says. "Don't worry about it."

"You're hurt?" He looks like he's been dragged through a bush backwards, like her grandmother used to say, but he's not bruised or bloodied, at least not that she can see.

"It's healing up," he says with a shrug. Now she's thinking maybe an accident on the job, something with one of the big machines they use, was what knocked him on his ass. But what he says next makes her reconsider. "This place'd be easy to rob. What's your take on a good night?"

"Who the fuck says something like that?" she says, wondering if he's trying to be funny and failing.

"A robber, I guess," he replies with a wolfish smile that doesn't touch his eyes.

Evie stands up straight, her gaze darting to Paul, the bouncer on duty that night. He catches her worried look and saunters over, making sure he doesn't have to toss anyone out. "Don't worry," the stranger says as he sees the big, bearded man approaching, "I'm not gonna. Old habits die hard, though."

"Any trouble here?" Paul asks Evie, keeping his eyes on the guy in case he makes an unexpected move. The guy just takes another sip of his Jack and watches them both, waiting. 

Evie shakes her head. "No trouble. Just another roughneck smartass who thinks he can impress me."

"Let me give you a piece of advice, bro - don't even try with this one," Paul says by way of a warning before he heads back to his usual spot near the stage.

"Sorry," says the guy - the robber - whatever he is. "Didn't mean to startle you. I promise this isn't how I usually operate. It's just been a day and a half of hell, and I'm not thinking straight."

"I'm not interested," she says firmly, even though she is. He's the most interesting person to come through here in the six months she's been working behind the bar, and she's curious about him. "Just drink your drink and watch the dancer like everyone else does."

He glances over his shoulder to see Holliday twisting her legs around the pole like pretzels, then turns away. "Not my type."

"Most guys who come into a strip club are here to see the girls." She suddenly wonders if maybe girls aren't his thing, but that makes even less sense. 

He just shakes his head and takes another drink. "I buried my priestess this morning. So forgive me if I'm not interested in the titty show."

His choice of the word 'priestess' throws Evie off enough that it takes her a second to process the rest of his statement. "Shit, I'm sorry. Your... girlfriend?" she guesses, trying to put the missing pieces together.

"My lover, my fighter..." He trails off, staring into mid-air and a foot to her left. "Dani."

Something about the name nudges Evie's memory, but she can't place it. "What happened to her?" This guy can't be more than twenty-five or so, so his girl was probably young too, cruelly young for whatever stole her away.

"What didn't happen to her?" he asks dryly, but with a smile that curls up his thin lips to show his teeth. "She drew trouble like a magnet. I never knew anyone who could piss people off so fast, or butter them up again so easy. She'd just smile like 'what you gonna do about it?' after she'd told someone just exactly how she was gonna take him apart, screw him over, steal everything he had - and more than likely, he'd let her have her way."

"Did you?" Evie feels like it might be poking at a sore spot but she can't help it. She knows that type of girl, or lesser versions of her maybe, and she knows the kind of men who let them get away with it, because they're in the club here every night, ready to give away their money for the promise of a pretty girl's attention. Somehow he doesn't seem like one of them.

He grins then, the first honest smile she's seen on his face. "No fucking way," he says, and pushes the empty glass toward her for another JD. She pours him a full glass this time. "She tried to pull that shit with me - once. But one grifter can tell another, and once was enough. After that we were a team. More than a team. Partners."

"I thought you said you were a robber, not a con artist," she points out.

"A gifted operator's got to be both," he says. "Smooth enough that they don't pull the alarm or go for the gun behind the bar - you _do_ have a gun behind the bar, right? Your hand moved towards it just for a second there - or at least not until it's too late. Work it just right and maybe you get an extra few minutes to get away before they figure out what's really happened. Walk away casual enough and maybe the cops don't even know it's you they're looking for. That can make all the difference." 

Evie nods along with him, like this isn't the weirdest conversation she's had with a customer in the six months she's worked here. On the stage, Holliday's finished up her set and is collecting a few meager tips from the diehard guys in pervert's row. The next girl up is a new one who just came in on Monday, and Dave (the DJ and general guy who fixes shit when it breaks) announces her as Callie. She's got kind of a cowgirl thing going on, with a black bandana and some boots and a wide leather belt with holsters. The sparse crowd gives a few whoops and cheers, to be polite. Evie hasn't had time to learn her real name yet, she's barely said two words to her - keeps to herself. 

"You ever been to Minnesota?" the guy asks out of nowhere, drawing her attention back to him.

"Yeah. Well, I've been through it, anyway." She's from Ohio originally, not that she's going to tell this guy her life story. "Why?"

"Dani always wanted to go there," he says. "Said she wanted to see what a real winter was like. She grew up in Mississippi, so snow was just something you saw on TV. Once they got a half an inch or something, and it was just about the best day of her life. So she always said if we decided to retire someday, if we had enough that we could stop all this, if it was safe, she wanted to buy a house with a white picket fence in some little town in Minnesota." 

"Sounds nice," Evie says. Actually it sounded god-awful, if it was anything like the winters here. She'd caught the tail end of the last one and it had been miserable, and she was planning for sure to be long gone before the next one hit. And from the little she's heard so far about this girl, Dani, she doesn't think small-town Minnesota would be exciting enough for her. Maybe she'd stay for a few months or a year, but it would get boring pretty fast. She doesn't say that to this guy, though - he seems like the memory is cheering him up, at least a little bit, and she isn't gonna ruin that for him. "You could still do that, if you wanted."

"Nah," he says sadly. "It was her dream, it wouldn't feel right without her there."

He still hasn't said what happened to her, and maybe he isn't going to, but it itches at Evie's curiosity all the same. "Were you guys together long?" she asks instead.

"Three years, seventeen states," he tells her. "She was seventeen too when we hooked up, so her Pa tried to get the law involved. He was a cop," he said, like that explained everything. "It wasn't illegal or nothing, she was old enough, but he said I was a bad influence on her. Sure, that's how it went. So he got his buddies to give me a hard time over it - bust me on stupid little nothing charges - and sent her off to reform school. That was when we decided to take off, and well, we couldn't do that broke. We had a good run, anyway."

Something nags harder at Evie's brain, and she remembers a news story from a while back about a couple who were wanted for robbery in multiple states - gas stations, restaurants, at least one bank. The girl couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen, blonde and pretty, but she'd been the one holding the gun in the grainy video from a security camera that they'd shown. The report had called them a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, but she'd thought of them as Mickey and Mallory, because she's not eighty years old. She isn't sure if this is the same guy or not - the video had mostly focused on the girl, and he'd been wearing a hat. It could be, though. It's not impossible.

A couple of other customers come to the bar (Coors, Bud Light, and a fifty cent tip) and she's distracted for a little while. She spends the time wondering whether she ought to call the cops, or whether it's crazy to tell them she thinks maybe there's a wanted criminal in the club, based on... what? Some rambling story from a half-drunk guy whose name she doesn't even know? They might just laugh at her. And anyway, if she left to use her phone, there'd be no one at the bar... 

She turns back from the cash register once the two customers have left and finds a gun pointed at her. It's not even really a surprise at this point. He's between her and the gun they keep stashed behind the bar, so she can't try to grab for that, even if she was brave enough - and she's pretty sure she's not. The guy has the good grace to look apologetic. "I did warn you," he says.

Evie's eyes dart over to Paul, near the stage, and she sees that the dancer has drawn her toy gun, which apparently isn't a toy after all, and is ordering him to get down on the ground. She can't watch too much more because now he's telling her to empty the cash register. "It's been a slow night," she tells him as she pulls out maybe five hundred dollars in small bills and he stuffs them into a plastic bag with a shrug.

"Better'n nothing," he says, giving her a sly grin as he presses a twenty back into her hand. "A tip for you," he tells her, and glances over his shoulder to the woman, who jumps down from the stage and runs to his side, still with her .45 trained on the audience. The men look stunned, more than anything. 

"Saved the best for last, baby," the girl says with a merry laugh. She plants a kiss on the guy's cheek and together they walk out the door hand in hand. There's a long pause, with the country music still pumping away over the now-empty stage, and then someone in the audience starts a quiet round of applause. Like it was a particularly good show. And in a way, that's what it was - a magic show with a vanishing act at the end.

Evie shakes her head to clear it of the fog those two seemed to create just by their presence, and then pulls out her phone to call the cops. But like he told her up front, it's already going to be too late by the time they get here. She finds she doesn't entirely mind that thought. She hopes they'll make it to Minnesota one of these days.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr at [naryrising](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/naryrising) if you want to ask questions, make requests, or chat!


End file.
